Samba hangs: Gerry Maddock

[don_mccall at hp.com]

Hi Gerry,
If I was having this problem, I would (rather than bringing to init1,
etc) do some checking on the CAUSE of the slowness, and address that.
If bringing it down to init1 and back up to init3 solves the problem for
a few months, then you only have one opportunity per 3 months to do any
troubleshooting - don't waste it!
  First, from the samba side, check to see if you are having any disk
space problems because of the log.smb file (maybe you have a high level
of debug turned on, or lots of broken pipe messages filling up the log)
- this is not likely, but easy to check.
 Then, use smbstatus command to check on your Share mode memmory usage,
to make sure that that isn't filled up  (check to make sure that the
'free' column is not tiny compared to your 'used + overhead' column.
 Also check out the number of machines listed under the 'machine'
heading match up with the number of smbd (-1 for the daemon if you run
it via smbd -D) processes you find using "ps -ef|grep -i smbd"
 Another thing to check is to see if stopping and restarting SAMBA
(rather than going to init1) without changing anything else will solve
the problem.  This will tell you whether it is a SAMBA issue, or a
system resource that is causing the slowdown.

Just a couple of thoughts...
Don